It’s generally a fool’s errand to try to conjure the terminally online. The internet is atomized and algorithmic, diffuse and contradictory, not to mention timestamped to hell and immediately out of date; for as much as it has inflected all of our lives, most people are not on Twitter. Most art attempting to convey internet brain poisoning falls short of its target, failing to capture the depth, the speed, the overwhelm. The few that do it well, from Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This to Bo Burnham’s Inside, live and die by shrewd impersonations of how life in the scroll warps one’s thinking.
Job, a new play from Max Wolf Friedlich that transferred to Broadway after a buzzy off-Broadway run, is largely of the latter rarefied group. As the title indicates, it’s about the complications of a white-collar job, though marketing for the play, a tense two-hander, featuring stars Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon beset by thumbtacks and a stapler oversells corporate drudgery. Lemmon’s Jane works an office job, but of an elevated breed – she’s a well-compensated tech employee in the Bay Area who sincerely believes in the purpose of her work (and enjoys the campus gym). She has found devout purpose and nerve-shredding brain rot through, we come to learn, the deeply unenviable and largely hidden work of content moderation – or, in the parlance of her unnamed but archetypical giant tech company, “user care”.
Friedlich’s play, directed by Michael Herwitz and now running at the Hayes Theater, makes a number of bold gambits that shouldn’t work but do. The first image of the show is Jane pointing a gun at Friedman’s Loyd, an avuncular hippie-turned-psychotherapist, before their appointment has even begun. Dressed in a Cotopaxi jacket, Allbirds sneakers and an Apple Watch (costume designer Michelle J Li understood the assignment, as they say), Jane looks the part of a nervous zillennial tech employee, and speaks the gospel of big tech. She’s a self-described “Xanax girlie” (obtained illegally) who’s hyper self-critical yet allergic to therapy – unless said therapist can formally allow her to return from a mandatory work leave. Duress may be necessary; to be permanently let go, she says, “would be the worst thing that could happen”.
Jane also speaks the language of Twitter identity politics, which is at times difficult to believe coexists in the same tech utopian character, though Lemmon’s precise performance holds it together. Friedlich, who is 29, has a strikingly deft grip on internet brain rot – “boomer”, “villainize”, “gaslight”, “that’s not that original of a thought, though,” how consistent panic can become a comforting reminder of reality, how full-boil online anxiety can make passing out in a hospital sound nice. It isn’t, of course – Jane knows this well, having been hospitalized and sedated after a mental breakdown in the office, video of which went viral and, somewhat unbelievably, became a meme. (On that note, Job is one of the few plays I’ve seen to seamlessly integrate a phone, including its limited audio capabilities.)
Loyd, superbly played by Succession’s Friedman, is believably baffled and concerned by all this, as a device-using but not particularly online person in what appears to be the year 2020. The spine of the play’s action is a prolonged therapy session that doubles as a debate on reality – who is morally wrong, who knows more, who is the most certain. And most movingly, Jane’s desperate quest to make sense of too much information, though for us, all contained to Loyd’s airspace-lite office (scenic design by Scott Penner) and punctuated by the screeches, Technicolor lights, clicks and snippets of the online. (That these PTSD flashbacks, staged as reality outages, mostly succeed owe to lighting design by Mextly Couzin and sound design by Cody Spencer; original music by Devonté Hynes, AKA Blood Orange.)
It’s muscle-tensing and entertaining, particularly in the play’s middle stretch, to watch a meeting of two differently melted minds. And satisfying when Loyd pokes at Jane’s hypocrisies and delusions, her conviction that she’s nothing and also an online martyr – “It’s a privilege to suffer as much as I do,” she says. Still, Friedlich’s line-by-line writing is shrewd enough to convey Jane’s internal hell of self-reflective mirrors, her spiral of judgment to nowhere. Job is, for the most part, a tonal highwire act that wisely keeps to a taut 80 minutes. Or perhaps the more accurate metaphor is trapeze – swinging wildly between farce, zeitgeist-y drama and thriller. Somehow, it lands most of the tricks, including a turn toward the pitch-black in the final act, which ends just before it runs this tight battle of wills and expertise off the rails. Job smartly knows when to log off; there may be no grand messages (and thank God), but this is one of the more insightful internet spirals.
